Exploration

Earlier this week I presented a talk at the Web 2.0 Expo titled “HTML5 vs. Flash: Webpocalypse Now?” which seemed to be pretty well received. That might be because I did my best to be unbiased about the situation both now and into the future, and also that the audience was very heavily weighted toward web stack practitioners. Seriously, out of 100-150 audience members, about six raised their hand when I asked who was developing with Flash.

Many people have asked if the slides will be available. Indeed so: head on over to the session page, which I encourage attendees of the talk to visit so that you can leave a rating or comment on the session. The 5.4MB PDF of my Keynote slides is available there whether you attended or not.

While I was at the conference I was also interviewed by Mac Slocum on the topics of the HTML and Flash, and that’s been put up on YouTube along with interviews with Brady Forrest and Ge Wang (both of whom are awesome). I haven’t watched it so I don’t know how dorky I come off but I’ll bet it’s pretty dorky.

I indulged in a little good-natured ribbing of Adobe at the front of the interview (I kid because I love!) but the rest of it is, as best I recall, a decent distillation of my views. I’m hoping to get a few more detailed thoughts written and published here in the next week or two.

It’s interesting that this topic comes up at a time when I’m slated to begin a Adobe Flash class at my school towards the end of the month. I really liked your take or more correctly, your unbiased view on the Flash – HTML5 war. My personal learning focus has been mainly towards “open” technologies such as JavaScript, PHP/SQL, etc. At this point I’m not sure if I’ll really worry too much about adding action script to the list, yet.

Good for you, Eric.
Many years ago I thought Flash was on its way out; then came Flash Video.
ActionScript 3.0 is a slap in the face to Web designers. Whereas CSS and HTML are easy enough for a right-brained person to grasp, Flash (and all Adobe products) have added so many features that they’re almost unusable.
I appreciate OOP and respect those who can do it, but brackets, curly braces, colons, and !@#$%^&*() symbols belong in application programming, not Web design.

Nacron wrote in to say...

Jeff i think it is allways good to know how to program even as a designer. When you do user centered design and Information Architectures you do almost the same as in OOP you plan your software. And learning the syntax of a language is like learning a language and as a designer you need to know your language very very well. This is because design is 60 % or more about communication. I think all the talk about openness is good and the pressure on adobe leads them to good decisions (like the open source releases), but web standarts are only good when they are available. You can do things in Actionscript that are not possible in HTML5 for now. Maybe in 2 or 3 years if all the browser developers have done their best to implement it and especially microsoft.
And curly braces colons and symbols are in Javascript too and if you want to built interactive applications in HTML5 you have to use Javascript. Which is also Object Oriented…
Also from a designer point of view, they are really happy to change their designs in Photoshop or Illustrator push a button and get the site running whithout writing one line of html and css, which looks the same on every browser.
Cheers
Nacron

Remember to encode character entities if you're posting markup examples! Management reserves the right to edit or remove any comment—especially those that are abusive, irrelevant to the topic at hand, or made by anonymous posters—although honestly, most edits are a matter of fixing mangled markup. Thus the note about encoding your entities. If you're satisfied with what you've written, then go ahead...